Although the political repercussions of publication of the Tiananmen Papers remain to be seen, the insiders' account of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre does reveal new information, Perry Link, the book's co-editor, said yesterday.
Link, professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Princeton University, spoke to members of the Taipei Foreign Correspondents' Club yesterday afternoon on his book the Tiananmen Papers, co-edited with Andrew Nathan, director of Columbia University's East Asia Institute.
The book, a collection of hundreds of internal Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party documents purportedly smuggled out of China by a pro-reform civil servant, tells the story behind the 1989 demonstrations for the first time in the words of the political leaders in Beijing.
The civil servant, who is given the pseudonym Zhang Liang (
June Fourth: The True Story (
Link said that although Zhang hoped that publication of the book would revive the political reform process in China, Link said he was "skeptical" that it would do so.
"I think it's an open question. It may well have a considerable influence, and it may not. We have to watch what will happen in Beijing," Link said.
Link conceded that the book might initially be "counterproductive" as the communist leadership has recently required many Chinese officials to express their attitudes about the incident and watch videotapes giving the official account of the movement.
The long-term repercussions, however, remain unknown, Link said. "The chemistry might turn out to produce new discussions."
Describing what he had learned from the documents, Link said the materials offered vast details about related demonstrations in other cities in China.
Link, who was in Beijing at the time of the incident, also said the documents offer fresh revelations about the mindset of the soldiers who carried out the crackdown as well as the language high-ranking officials used to justify their decision to carry out the massacre.
"The soldiers were very thoroughly indoctrinated about what their duty was and what the student demonstration was. There was no conciliation built into that at all. ... They saw the move as their sacred duty to protect the motherland ... it was tightly and thoroughly done. So that surprised me," Link said.
"At first I thought the kind of language that said the movement was manipulated from behind the scenes by a tiny minority of people who were evilly motivated was false and cynical," Link said.
But the scholar said the documents changed his original perception. "After I read these, I thought that it may have begun as that, but in the end, [the language] also deceived the top leaders. Because in the repeating of it over and over again in meetings, eventually it seemed to take on its own sense of truth and the people on the higher level believed it. So for them, it wasn't a cynical lie although it's still a false description of what happened," Link said.
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